YouTube serves over 1 billion videos a day

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With a whopping one billion web videos served each day, YouTube has emerged as the McDonald’s of online media. With that much eyeballs and a range of monetizing opportunities, YouTube might break even in the near future.

YouTube is now serving over one billion videos a day, CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley revealed in a YouTube blog post this past Friday. Marking this significant milestone, Hurley reminisced on October 2006, when he and co-founder Steve Chen sighed with relief as Google acquired the young startup and its 65 employees for a cool $1.65 billion in an all stock transaction, Google’s largest acquisition at the time:

Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We’d just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world’s information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.

Hurley also reflected upon three founding principles of YouTube that have remained valid over time, especially now that YouTube under Google’s wing has become the #1 destination for online video:

Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.

Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.

Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.

Christian’s Opinion

Today’s YouTube is a far cry from the original video service prior to the Google acquisition. Google’s unlimited resources have enabled the YouTube team to unveil a number of enhancements. For example, when bandwidth increased enough, YouTube finally upgraded to HD. Google has also addressed the copyright infringement issue with an advanced fingerprinting system that matches uploaded content against copyrighted materials, allowing content owners to either take down infringed videos or opt-in for a revenue sharing scheme with Google. This has paved the way for full-length content, like TV shows and movies, that now legally exists on YouTube.

YouTube now provides comprehensive analytic tools.

When Google acquired YouTube three years ago, most commentators asked whether the search giant can ever monetize YouTube. Because Google has remained mum about YouTube’s financial metrics so far, we simply don’t know whether or not ads on YouTube earn enough money to cover operational costs.

Google runs premium display ads alongside YouTube videos, in addition to its trademark text-based ads that also appear in the Google.com search results. Google chooses ads that reflect your interests, based on the types of videos you watch and your YouTube activities like uploading and favorite-ing videos. Google says that YouTube uses behavioral data obtained by tracking your visits on sites that are members of the Google content network.

Since Google recently opened YouTube’s ad revenue sharing to everyone, authors of videos that accumulate lots of views are given a chance to make money. In addition, authors can promote their YouTube content by buying search keywords so their videos appear alongside YouTube search results and on partner watch pages. Most recently, Google tweaked its advertising engine with a new capability that lets content authors promote their YouTube videos via contextually targeted text ads across AdSense-enabled sites. Despite all these advances, YouTube probably doesn’t break even so it’s no wonder that “monetizing YouTube” remains one the tech press’ favorite headline.

A recent comScore survey estimated that Google-owned sites served 10 billion videos out of the 25 billion online videos served in the U.S. during August. However, at 1 billion videos a day, YouTube alone could average at 30 billion videos a month, rendering comScore results way too conservative.

Speak Your Mind

RobertEH

I’ve been searching for a lot of time now in order to get a simple trick in order to download videos from youtube .
There are a lot of them including software tools , firefox plugins , many scripts etc.. Well most of them are good at doing what they really do .